Tag: poverty

Poverty Kills More Americans Than Obesity, Diabetes, and Drug Overdoses, Study Reveals

Poverty kills more Americans than obesity, diabetes, and murders, making it the nation’s fourth leading cause of death, according to a new analysis. A researcher from the University of California-Riverside reports that the only things that kill more people are heart disease, cancer, and smoking.

According to the findings, not earning enough money to meet basic needs contributed to around 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 alone. An international team working on this project are now dubbing poverty the “silent killer.”

This is a conservative estimate, scientists note, since the data focused on those over 15 years of age and was collected just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic — which caused spikes in deaths as well as an economic upheaval worldwide.

The researchers defined poverty as earning less than 50 percent of the median U.S. income. Suicides, firearms, homicides, and obesity, diabetes, and drug overdoses, were all less lethal than poverty, according to the study. Impoverished people have roughly the same survival rate until they reach their 40s. After this, they die at significantly high rates than those with more adequate incomes and resources.

Scientists believe their research has major policy implications and urge those in power to pay more attention to the issue. They add that beyond the emotional suffering of bereaved loved ones, death is expensive for a family, community, and government.

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Colorado school district to introduce biometric scans of kids for free school meal access

The Poudre School District, in Colorado, will be piloting a controversial biometrics program to make the distribution of free lunches more “efficient.”

The pilot program will launch by May 25, 2023 in elementary, middle, and high schools, if it doesn’t go contested.

According to the school district, the biometric scans would take around two seconds. The program will use identiMetrics scanners, which will replace the current system where students have to enter their ID number on a keyboard to access their free school meal.

The fingerprints will be stored locally by the school district.

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‘Self-serving’ North Dakota GOP boosts own meal allowance after axing free school lunch bill

Republicans in North Dakota are facing criticism this week after they voted to boost their own budgets for meal reimbursements, even as they blocked an expansion of a free lunch program for low-income school students.

The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead reports that the Republican-dominated North Dakota Senate voted to ratify the boost to meal reimbursements for lawmakers and state workers just 10 days after the same institution narrowly blocked a bill that would have expanded the state’s free lunch program.

According to the Forum, the legislation had previously passed through North Dakota’s House of Representatives and would have “dedicated $6 million over the next two school years to cover lunch costs for K-12 students with family incomes below double the federal poverty level,” meaning that “children from families of four making less than $60,000 a year would have qualified.”

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Obama Center is displacing black families by significantly raising neighborhood’s rent, Chicago residents say

South Side Chicago residents recently revealed to the Washington Post that the construction of the Obama Presidential Center has led to a significant increase in the neighborhood’s rent, causing the displacement of long-term residents, including many black families.

In September 2021, former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama broke ground on the Obama Presidential Center in the South Side of Chicago. The center, located on a 19-acre lot, will include a public library, playground, community centers, and a museum.

The $500 million project has been largely financed by private donors. The construction, which is still ongoing, is estimated to bring $3.1 billion to the community. In addition, it is predicted to generate another $16.5 million in state and local tax revenue.

At the groundbreaking ceremony, Obama told the audience that the center would “give back to Chicago and the South Side in particular.”

“The Obama Presidential Center is our way of repaying some of what this amazing city has given us,” he stated.

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GOP Lawmaker Says Hungry People Don’t Exist Because He’s Never Met One

As the Minnesota state senate debated a bill meant to provide more free school meals to kids living in poverty, one Republican senator’s rationale for voting against it was simple: those kids don’t exist.

While many of his GOP colleagues argued against the cost of Senate Bill 12—$200 million annually—State Sen. Steve Drazkowski cast doubt on the idea that hungry families exist in his state at all.

“I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don’t have access to enough food to eat,” State Sen. Steve Drazkowski said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “We need to make sure, if we’re going to develop more food welfare programs, and force them on the kids and families in the state of Minnesota, we got to make sure that they’re not at least riddled with the type of fraud that basically is stealing from the people of Minnesota.”

Drazkowski, who served the state House for 13 years prior to being elected to the Senate in 2022, called the measure “pure socialism” and part of the state’s attempt to control what kids eat. He mocked the idea of hungry kids, adding that the term “hunger” is relative.

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‘The Government Is Trying To Kill Us Now’: Low-Income Americans Wait in 9-hour Long Food Lines as Pandemic Benefits End

Over the past year, 18 US states have officially ended pandemic-era states of emergency – including the covid food benefit, while a December mandate from Congress will end aid in March for the other 32 states, along with the District of Columbia, the US Virgin Islands and Guam.

The collective return to pre-pandemic policies includes enhanced unemployment benefits and child tax credits, as well as a rollback adjustment to Medicaid that boosted enrollment.

Now, people are waiting up to nine hours in mile-long lines for free food – some of whom say they can only afford to eat once per day, while others say they limit expensive food items such as meat for specific family members, such as growing teenage boys.”

I thought, ‘Wow, the government is trying to kill us now,” said 63-year-old Danny Blair of Kentucky. Blair, who lives in a mobile home with his wife, survives on his Social Security disability check, the Washington Post reports.

“They are going to starve us out,” Blair continued, apparently unaware that government assistance provided during the pandemic wasn’t permanent.

Blair and his wife hop into their truck twice a month at 4 a.m. to ensure they get a few staples at the Hazel Green Food Project’s giveaway. On a recent Friday, they waited nine hours until local prisoners on work duty started loading bags of meat and vegetables, potato chips and cookies into vehicles in one of the nation’s most impoverished communities.

From the front to the back of the line, the sea of despair and hardship along this desolate Kentucky highway foreshadowed what may be in store for millions of Americans as the federal government ended the remaining pandemic increase in monthly food stamp benefits this week. -WaPo

As the Post frames it, the pullback of pandemic-related aid could pose a setback to the Biden administration’s efforts to ‘slash poverty’ while building a ‘healthier and more sustainable middle class’ – none of which were the stated goals of the temporary aid.”

We saw positive benefits from this and less hardship, including for families with children,” said Dottie Rosenbaum, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who points out that all the free money helped reduce childhood poverty rates in 2021. “We can expect that to reverse now.”

Following the reduction in benefits, the average SNAP recipient’s benefits are expected to drop by around $90 per month, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That said, an even greater reduction is in store for seniors and the working poor who receive assistance from other government programs, and will likely qualify for less.

In Kentucky, many seniors on food stamps saw their monthly benefit drop from $281 to $22 last year after the state ended the pandemic emergency in May, according to local food bank network, Feeding Kentucky.

Other states are preparing for the same“

We are bracing, and our agencies, member food banks, food pantries and soup kitchens are not prepared for what is about to hit them,” Said Ohio Association of Foodbanks executive director, Lisa Hamler-Fugitt. “This reduction, and end of the public health emergency, could not be coming at a worse time.”

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Countless Americans Plunge Into Despair As Hunger Spreads Like Wildfire All Across America

We haven’t seen anything like this in a long time.  A couple of factors are combining to push millions of Americans into a state of food insecurity.  First of all, food prices have been rising aggressively throughout the past year, and so our money does not go nearly as far as it once did.  Meanwhile, food stamp benefits are being slashed.  The federal government had greatly enhanced food stamp benefits for many Americans during the pandemic, but now that emergency program is coming to an end.  So what this means is that many Americans are going to have very little money to spend on food at a time when economic conditions are starting to get really rough.

The Washington Post recently sent a reporter named Tim Craig to Kentucky, and he discovered that poor people are waiting in “a mile-long line” just to get some free food…

As he claimed the first spot in a mile-long line for free food in the Appalachian foothills, Danny Blair vividly recalled receiving the letter announcing that his pandemic-era benefit to help buy groceries was about to be slashed.

Kentucky lawmakers had voted to end the state’s health emergency last spring, by default cutting food stamp benefits created to help vulnerable Americans like Blair weather the worst of covid-19. Instead of $200 a month, he would get just $30.

Blair actually gets up at 4 AM in the morning so that he can be first in line for these handouts.

On the Friday that the reporter from the Washington Post interviewed him, he ended up staying in that line for nine hours.

I couldn’t imagine waiting in line for that long, but Blair feels like this is what he and his wife must do in order to survive…

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When the Government Makes Poverty Worse

For individuals struggling to make ends meet, the government might be causing more problems than it is solving.

As part of a new report released Monday, a survey of more than 1,000 low-income Pennsylvanians found that taxes are often a major barrier to economic security—ranking ahead of more commonly discussed problems such as credit card debt and student loans. Among those surveyed, all of whom have incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level (about $53,000 annually for a family of four), the average respondent reported paying $4,575 per year in taxes.

Elizabeth Stelle, director of policy analysis for the Commonwealth Foundation, the pro-market think tank that published the report, says the data should prompt officials to rethink some of the root causes of poverty in the state and across the country.

“Before we start talking about more ways to alleviate the symptoms of poverty,” Stelle says, “we need to take a step back and think about what obstacles the government has in place right now that are holding back people that are limiting prosperity.”

That’s not the only common myth that the new report aims to bust. Here’s another: Most poor Pennsylvanians (63 percent) work or are currently seeking a job. Meanwhile, the report also found that poverty is not exclusively a crisis for cities and other urban areas. In fact, of the five Pennsylvania counties with the highest poverty rates, four are found in sparsely populated rural areas (the fifth is Philadelphia).

Poverty in Forest County—deep in the wilderness of the Allegheny Mountains southeast of Erie—is far different from poverty in Philadelphia. Stelle sees that as an argument against one-size-fits-all government-based poverty reduction schemes, which can fail to take into account the needs of individuals in such diverse economic environments.

Though the report surveys only a single state, Pennsylvania is a useful political and economic microcosm for the country as a whole. It has urban pockets, sprawling and prosperous suburbs, an industrial legacy, and widespread rural areas that are often overlooked. It remains a crucial swing state and a political bellwether—its state legislature is currently enduring a weeks-long crisis that makes Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s election look tame by comparison. As such, it’s an important laboratory of democracy and a state where shifting views on policy can have national implications.

Pennsylvania has increased spending on social welfare programs over the past few decades, but the poverty rate in the state has remained stubbornly flat, the report shows. The paper asks officials to consider a counterfactual history: If Pennsylvania had enacted a rule in 2003 that capped future government spending increases at a combination of inflation and population growth (and had returned the surplus to taxpayers), the average low-income resident of the state would have an extra $20,000 in the bank today, simply due to the lower tax burden.

That’s a messier solution to poverty than drawing up government programs that specifically target people living in certain conditions. But it’s one that would empower every individual in the state to make their own decisions about how to pursue prosperity.

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Can’t Afford Groceries In Biden’s America? Wall Street Journal Says Just Don’t Eat!

As many Americans struggle to put food on the table, The Wall Street Journal proposed an idea this week: Instead of Biden taking responsibility for his destructive public policy, you should just skip breakfast.

Titled “To Save Money, Maybe You Should Skip Breakfast,” the article analyzed three popular breakfast foods — eggs, juice, and cereal — and offered explanations for why they cost significantly more since last year. According to the Journal, eggs are up a whopping 70 percent, frozen orange juice is up more than 12 percent, and cereal is up 15 percent since just one year ago.

Why the crippling increases? The explanations were as plentiful as they were diverse: avian flu, bad weather, citrus disease, dead chickens, and Vladimir Putin.

Global food supply includes a myriad of liabilities and moving parts, and of course, a drop in supply will play in role in rising prices. But the Journal neglected to mention perhaps the most important contributor to Americans’ economic woes: Biden’s apparently limitless federal spending.

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A Good Democrat: Liberal NBA Player Stephen Curry Opposes Affordable Housing Development Near His Mansion

NBA player Stephen Curry is a liberal, Biden-supporting Democrat. He is also a hypocrite.

Despite being part of a nonprofit that “aims to promote economic equality and opportunity,” Curry and his wife are opposing the construction of an affordable housing development near their multi-million dollar mansion.

It’s classic NIMBY – Not in my back yard.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Lib NBA Star Stephen Curry Opposes Affordable Housing Near His $30 Million Mansion

NBA superstar and Biden-supporter Stephen Curry is opposing the proposed construction of a low-income multifamily unit proposed for construction next to his $30 million mansion, saying he has “major concerns” for his “privacy” and “safety.”

Curry, who joined a nonprofit in 2021 focused on “bridging the racial wealth gap,” wrote a letter with his wife Ayesha to the city of Atherton, Calif., asking that it reconsider the construction of a 16-unit property near their estate.

“We hesitate to add to the ‘not in our backyard’ (literally) rhetoric, but we wanted to send a note before today’s meeting,” the couple wrote in the letter. “Safety and privacy for us and our kids continues to be our top priority.”

While the Golden State Warriors guard opposes affordable housing in his own neighborhood, Curry in 2021 joined the nonprofit NinetyToZero, which aims to promote economic equality and opportunity…

Curry is a longtime Democrat. He joined former president Barack Obama for a town hall on racial equality in 2019. A year later, he put his kids in front of a camera during the 2020 DNC to endorse Joe Biden. He gave $10,000 to Colin Kaepernick-linked charities and called Donald Trump’s 2024 run a ‘threat.”

He wants to help the little guy, as long as it doesn’t happen in his neighborhood.

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